Gender and Education

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Examining the gendered timescapes of higher

education: reflections through letter writing as
feminist praxis

Penny Jane Burke, Gifty Oforiwaa Gyamera & the Ghanaian Feminist
Collective

To cite this article: Penny Jane Burke, Gifty Oforiwaa Gyamera & the Ghanaian Feminist
Collective (2022): Examining the gendered timescapes of higher education: reflections through
letter writing as feminist praxis, Gender and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2022.2151982

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GENDER AND EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2022.2151982

Examining the gendered timescapes of higher education:

reflections through letter writing as feminist praxis
a
Penny Jane Burke , Gifty Oforiwaa Gyamerab and the Ghanaian Feminist
Collectivec
a
Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education, The University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia;
b
School of Public Service and Governance, Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration,
Accra, Ghana; cMembers of the Ghana Feminist Collective: Professor Olivia Kwapong, Dr Beatrice Akua-
Sakyiwaa, Dr Joyce Anku, Dr Patricia Amos, Dr Theresa Antwi, Dr Stella Appiah, Mildred Asmah, Magaret
Ismaila, Mansah Preko, Esther Ayine, Dr Patricia Amos, Sophia Abnory, Prof Bertha Osei Hwedie, Dr Mrs
Charity Binka, Sarah Serwaa Boateng, Lois Odame

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article examines the significance of neoliberalism in re/shaping Received 18 May 2022
the gendered timescapes of higher education in Ghana through its Accepted 20 November 2022
intersection with patriarchal forces. It draws from a project aiming
KEYWORDS
to create non-hierarchical, co-mentoring spaces in which time-space; gendered
participants collaboratively generate feminist analyses. Letter- inequalities; neoliberalism;
writing was identified as a form of feminist praxis and an auto/ patriarchy; higher education;
biographical method to access the multidimensional inequalities women’s careers; auto/
women navigated in their careers. Opening counter-hegemonic biographical and epistolary
time–space and providing feminist conceptual resources, the methods
women explored their aspirations, experiences, and subjectivities.
In Ghana, women are attempting to balance the accelerated
temporalities of neoliberal higher education, as productive
subjects, with the explicit demands of patriarchy, which construct
them primarily in reproductive terms as wives and mothers. Our
collective reflections illustrate that intersecting forces are at play
that impact women’s higher education careers in unpredictable
and contradictory ways.

Introduction
This paper draws from a body of work exploring feminist writing praxis (Burke and
Jackson 2007; Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017; Burke and Gyamera 2020) and the trans-
formative potential of feminist collaborative methodologies to challenge hegemonic
forces that reproduce gendered inequalities (Burke 2002). It draws from an ongoing
project aiming to create non-hierarchical, co-mentoring spaces in which participants gen-
erate feminist analysis to examine the intersecting dynamics of neoliberalism and patriar-
chy in Ghanaian higher education and in their lives. The project conception emerged from
Gifty Gyamera’s personal experiences as a female, early-career researcher struggling to be

CONTACT Penny Jane Burke pennyjane.burke@newcastle.edu.au Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher
Education, The University of Newcastle, IDC Building, Callaghan, Newcastle NSW 2308, Australia
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
2 P. J. BURKE ET AL.

taken seriously by the male university leaders in Ghana she sought to interview for her
PhD. This led to an increasing awareness that there were very few senior women aca-
demics and leaders in Ghanaian higher education, and her determination to better under-
stand the gendered dynamics she experienced through her doctoral studies. The project
aimed to open time and space for women academics and administrators in Ghana to cri-
tically explore their experiences whilst providing peer mentoring and mutual support.
Letter-writing was identified as a method to generate possibilities for exchange, deep
reflection and new understanding. This paper draws from the letters produced by the pro-
gramme participants and our collective analyses of these.
We identified letter-writing as an auto/biographical method, which would enable us to
access immediate experience, feelings and emotions (Tamboukou 2020, xvii). In keeping
with epistolary studies, letter-writing provides an ‘everyday-ness’ and generates critical
reflection on the taken-for-granted nature of lived experience (Halldórsdóttir 2020,
186). This allows examination of complex layers of meaning (Tamboukou 2020, xvii)
and the contexts in which letters are written and read (Halldórsdóttir 2020, 190). We
drew on letter-writing as a method committed to reciprocity (Halldórsdóttir 2020, 190),
to collaboratively re/craft the meanings attached to women’s experiences in specific Gha-
naian contexts. However, working with letters raises key questions around a ‘complex
spectrum of questions around representation, context, truth, power, desire, identity, sub-
jectivity, memory and ethics, questions’ and requires close analytical attention to the
context in which the letters are produced (Tamboukou 2020, xvii). We are interested in
the ways our letters reveal women’s everyday experiences over time of the spaces of
home, work and study, in which there is a strong patriarchal imperative for women to
fulfil what is often constructed as their ‘Divine’ and ‘Existential’ roles in becoming wives
and mothers (Gyamera and Burke 2020). As one woman explains in her letter:
That is where the difficulty lies because its either you focus on the family or the career. For
there is an adage that, ‘when you look into the bottle with the two eyes you go blind’. Its
either you succeed with the academic or the family. Hence for me, the family is first and
the career second. With this I know that the speed with which I will need to climb the aca-
demic ladder will be less as compared with my male counterpart, but that is the price to
pay and I accept with no complaints. (Academic)

Patriarchy does not operate as a singular or monodimensional political force. It works

within a complex dynamic of entwined forces and relations, which play out at the
macro-level of institutions and affect the micro-level of lived experiences (Burke,
Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017). This includes the gendered experiences of neoliberal tem-
poralities, such as the expectation to be a ‘productive’ academic within constrained time-
frames that are often out of alignment with the pressures of home and family, and
institutional spatialities, such as the ways different bodies are discursively positioned in
space in relation to being (mis)recognized as an ‘academic’, ‘manager’, ‘wife’ and/or
‘mother’.
The lens of a ‘landscape’ has been a central way to articulate higher education research
and policy. However, this has been critiqued by higher education scholars (Burke and
Manathunga 2020) who argue for a ‘temporally balanced approach’ – or a ‘power chron-
ography’ – which enables a ‘balanced space–time approach to understanding different
temporalities’ (Sharma 2013, 316). Higher education is not a static institution; it is consti-
tuted by material and discursive spatialities and temporalities that contribute to
 GENDER AND EDUCATION 3

producing and/or challenging gendered relations and subjectivities. Higher education

time–space – or ‘timescapes’ (Adam 1998) – are shaped by the social practices, embodied
subjectivities and inequalities that generate assumptions about what higher education is,
and who it is for (Burke 2012). The increasing expectation of academics to be tireless
workers (Oleksiyenko 2018, 193) who are always available and committed to juggling
competing professional demands in the increasingly accelerated temporalities of aca-
demic labour (Burke and Manathunga 2020) is in contestation with the patriarchal
demands on women associated with reproductive labour. Although it is now well-estab-
lished that higher education has entered an era of neoliberalism globally (e.g. Slaughter
and Leslie 1997; Gill 2010; Morley and Crossouard 2016), we need to understand this
within specific national contexts. In Ghana, neoliberal frameworks have gradually but
steadily seeped into the core fabric of higher education (Gyamera and Burke 2018;
Gyamera 2019) with significant effects for women academics and administrators, who
are confronted with gendered socio-cultural expectations within what is discursively con-
structed as a level playing field through neoliberal discourses of meritocracy (Francis,
Burke, and Read 2014).
Despite the pervasiveness of neoliberalism in Ghanaian higher education, both faculty
and administrators have limited time and space to make sense of its impact and/or to cri-
tique neoliberal policies and practices, which have become discursively engrained and
thus to some extent invisible. Indeed, the move towards neoliberalism is highly desired
by Ghanaian executive university leaders and thus those who exhibit neoliberal orien-
tations are perceived as heroes and leaders worth emulation (Gyamera 2014). Within
this context, this paper explores the heterogeneous perspectives of women academics
and administrators in Ghana navigating the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and patri-
archy on educational and career experiences. Building on Gyamera’s doctoral study
(2014), we examine the extent to which Ghanaian academics and administrators are com-
pelled by neoliberalism; and what possibilities there are for resistance to the hegemonic
timescapes of higher education workplaces. We explore how the performative demands
of neoliberalism intersect with the social, cultural and traditional expectations of women.
We consider this through feminist methods of letter writing, facilitated through our par-
ticipatory project that offered a series of workshops held in Ghana and co-designed by
Gifty Gyamera and Penny Jane Burke. This participatory project brought us together
with women academics and administrators across Ghana over sustained time (from
2017 to present) in a community of praxis (Burke 2020), which we name the Ghanaian
Feminist Collective.

Gendered inequalities in the (neoliberal) timescapes of higher education

Neoliberalism impacts gender equity in subtle ways that are not straightforwardly mea-
surable, such as feelings of shame, resentment or isolation, and this requires close-up fem-
inist analyses to bring to light these insidious inequalities (Burke 2020). Feminist analyses
involve the detailed work that enables contextualization and in-depth understanding of
the complex relation of neoliberal timescapes to lived experiences of gendered inequal-
ities. Intersectional theory (e.g. Hill Collins 2019; Hill Collins and Bilge 2020) illuminates
that feminist analysis is required at the personal level (e.g. how gender and neoliberalism
are intersecting forces that differently position and construct academic subjectivities and
4 P. J. BURKE ET AL.

practices) and at the macro level (e.g. how inequalities are systematically organized and
produced through intersecting structures of oppression and relations of power). Feminist
theory of social justice as multidimensional (Fraser 2009, 2013), when applied to higher
education (e.g. Burke 2012; Bozalek, Holscher, and Zembylas 2020), enables nuanced
analysis of lived experiences across social (redistributive justice), cultural (recognitive
justice) and political (representative justice) dimensions. Feminist analyses emphasizes
the importance of attention to the inter-related global, national, institutional and
micro-level contexts in which experience and subjectivity is formed across time–space.
Mono-dimensional explanations that focus on a singular political force (e.g. a focus on
neoliberalism alone) and one dimension of inequality (e.g. a focus only on the cultural
expectations of women) are always limited in illuminating the complex lived, embodied
experiences of gender within and across the timescapes of higher education in relation to
other intersecting timescapes (e.g. of family, home and work).
Feminist work has highlighted how neoliberalism presents higher education as gender
neutral, by constructing humans in discourses of individualism operating as consumers of
the market of higher education. In such constructions, students and staff are perceived as
agentic subjects, freely exercising their individuality, individualism and individual choice.
This impacts on personal understanding and articulation of experiences of higher edu-
cation and tends to make invisible the impact of gendered and other structural inequal-
ities on identity-formation.
Furthermore, feminist scholars have brought attention to the ways that neoliberal
demands often impact more heavily on women academics than their male counterparts
(Currie, Thiele, and Harris 2002). Although neoliberal cultures affect every individual aca-
demic, women are positioned differently in relation to complex gendered inequalities and
power relations (Currie, Thiele, and Harris 2002). For example, women as a group have
lower salaries and hold fewer senior positions across transnational higher education con-
texts (Hills et al. 2010; Lipton 2015). There is evidence that women have a lower success
rate with prestigious funding bodies (Boyle et al. 2015; Ley and Hamilton 2008; Watson
and Hjorth 2015), which might be reflective of their underrepresentation in the disciplin-
ary fields that tend to attract more prestigious and larger funding. Furthermore, family
and domestic responsibilities continue to place a heavier weight on women rather
than men (e.g. Lynch 2010; Beaudry and Prozesky 2017) and women tend to be concen-
trated in casual, part-time and/or teaching-only contracts (Probert 2005). In Ghana, male
staff far exceed females, even in subject areas historically associated with women (Atua-
hene and Owusu-Ansah, 2013). Female students and staff similarly often face gendered
inequalities that operate at a number of levels, including negotiating multiple and contra-
dictory demands on their time through caring commitments, facing sexual harassment
and violence and being constructed in deficit ways in relation to gendered polarizing dis-
courses (such as lacking confidence).

Letter writing as a feminist collective praxis

This paper draws on a participatory project with women who form the Ghanaian Feminist
Collective and who occupy different roles and positions in Ghanaian higher education.
The project was framed by Pedagogical Methodologies (Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek
2017; Burke and Lumb 2018) or PPOEMs (Praxis-based Pedagogical, Ethically-oriented,
 GENDER AND EDUCATION 5

Methodologies, see Burke 2020), with the aim to open up counter-hegemonic time–space
and feminist conceptual resources for women to explore the ways that intersecting power
relations and multidimensional inequalities play out in relation to their education and
career aspirations, experiences and subjectivities. PPOEMs reframes research as a pedago-
gical space, in which time is prioritized for collaborative meaning-making of shared ques-
tions. We engaged a process of re-searching our experiences of higher education together
through feminist analysis and by collectively examining the discourses at play in the
different timescapes we were situated within, across and between (e.g. of work, study,
home and family). The methods were co-developed with the aim to generate a shared
sense of understanding whilst recognizing the differences, contestations and contexts
across the Collective. Our praxis-based framework was developed by a commitment to
ongoing dialogue facilitated through the workshops and re-search methods, with sus-
tained consideration of the power dynamics within and beyond the workshops and the
ways these shaped the politics of representation. Our key methods were Letter Writing
as Feminist Praxis and Autobiography of the Question (Burke and Gyamera 2020),
which enabled expression of our different histories and experiences with close and critical
engagement with feminist concepts, material, and insights. In thinking about our work as
‘re-search’, we are emphasizing the continual and reflexive process of bending research
back on itself (Usher 1997, 36) and of taking up positions of un-knowing (Lather 2009).
Our aim was to invite collaborative and personal engagement across the different con-
texts, disciplines, perspectives, inequalities and dilemmas that the re-searchers navigated
and to interrogate our ‘social location to disentangle how it shaped [our different]
definition[s] of the situation[s]’ (Haney 2004, 297) we explored though our letter-
writing, auto/biographical exploration and workshop exchanges.
The Ghanaian Feminist Collective was constituted of a diverse group of sixteen women
academics and administrators at different stages of their careers, representing different
positions, age groups and home-life contexts. The women were from five Ghanaian uni-
versities (one private university and four public universities in the Accra and Central
regions of Ghana). The Collective was comprised of eleven academics, eight of these at
the early stages of their careers, and five administrators at different career stages. The
women were aged between 25 and 65 with the majority between the ages of 40–55.
Fifteen of the women identified as Christian and ten of the women were married with chil-
dren. Six of the women belonged to a Ghanaian minority ethnic group and six of the
women worked in three of the largest universities in Ghana. Five of the women were
undertaking PhD research.
The workshops were co-designed and facilitated by Gifty and Penny with the aim to
generate a feminist timescape in which participants had the opportunity to explore
their personal experiences with their peers and in relation to wider structural, social, cul-
tural and political inequalities. The workshops provided access to feminist theories and
methodologies to facilitate possibilities for critical reflexivity, and through letter-writing,
participants were invited to engage in writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson 2003).
The letters drawn from in this paper were generated through participation in two 3-day
residential workshops, which aimed to offer a timescape shaped by an ethics of care,
empathy and collaboration. The workshops, held in 2018, introduced the Collective to
feminist concepts to explicitly critique neoliberal higher education and to stimulate criti-
cal reflection of personal and collective experiences. The project intentionally
6 P. J. BURKE ET AL.

redistributed pedagogical, theoretical, methodological and material resources via litera-

ture, feminist methods, accommodation, travel expenses and workshop materials with
the aim to bring the women together in a peaceful, caring and relaxing space that
enabled peer-exchange and co-mentoring. The workshop venue in Ghana was deliber-
ately selected as a scenic, beautiful, and restorative space as a form of recognition of
the value of each woman’s important contribution and of the significance of re-searching
together. The intention was to create a timescape that contrasted the neoliberal and
patriarchal demands of higher education and family, both critiqued as ‘greedy insti-
tutions’ (Edwards 2017). The workshops were designed to bring women together in col-
lective dialogue, helping to create feminist ‘communities of praxis’ (Burke 2020), with the
aim to collectively interrogate the taken-for-granted assumptions and practices within
our professional and academic communities and to begin a process of praxis, or
ongoing critical reflection/action. A series of workshops enabled sustained engagement
with collaborative and pedagogical processes of deep analysis of the personal (our auto-
biographical accounts through letter writing) and the political (our collective analysis of
the neoliberal and patriarchal spaces of higher education). It is important to recognize
that the workshop was strongly shaped by the feminist values and perspectives
brought by Penny and Gifty as the workshop designers and facilitators. This inevitably
formed the ethos and tone of the project and shaped the Collective. However, as part
of the PPOEMs process, we took care to create a time and space in which it felt possible
for participants to express dissent and to critique the workshop materials offered.
Letter writing was drawn on as a ‘method of inquiry’ (Richardson 2003), through the
‘autobiography of the question’ (Miller 1997). Participants formed part of a feminist
writing collective and were encouraged to let their writing flow in any way they
wanted to, disrupting the regulatory conventions of academic writing (Lillis 2001).
Letter writing created a sense of connection, being heard and ‘being part of something
that happens when you know someone else is reading you’ (Lira, Muñoz-García, and
Loncon 2019, 480). A set of questions were offered to support the writing process
without expectations of rigidly following these in any prescribed way. Writing-in-progress
was shared in a supportive environment to generate discussion, connection and reflexiv-
ity, creating emergent spaces of co-mentoring and praxis. An iterative approach to letter
writing enabled the women to consider the impact of intersecting forces on their lives in
relation to personal, educational and career experiences and subjectivities and to identify
intersections of struggles for freedom (Davis 2016). The letters were crafted as drafts that
could be reworked over time as the women gained a deeper grasp of what they wanted to
say in relation to the workshop materials, discussions and processes.
The challenges in working collaboratively inevitably brought to the fore the ethical
dilemmas in working across differences, respecting the diverse perspectives and values
across the group and recognizing the personal autobiographies and experiences
brought into dialogue with broader theories and concepts and in relation to wider
social structures and contexts. It was important to be sensitive to the different relation-
ships of the women to feminist theories, methodologies and debates, including that
many of the Collective members were unfamiliar with these and were coming to these
ideas for the first time. This was deeply challenging for some of the women as well as
for Gifty and Penny in sustaining sensitive pedagogical relationalities across the
different time, space and embodied experiences opened by the PPOEMs framework.
 GENDER AND EDUCATION 7

Furthermore, it was important that Penny in particular interrogated her assumptions as a

White feminist academic, based outside of Ghana. In writing this paper, Gifty and Penny
reread the letters and identified emerging themes which were then shared with the Col-
lective for their thoughts. Drafts of this paper were circulated to all members of the Col-
lective for their feedback. Inspired by a feminist collective biographical approach (Davies
and Gannon 2006), we have woven extracts from the letters in relation to the emergent
themes, to explore women’s lived experiences and subjectivities within the timescapes of
higher education.
These collaborative methods generated a unique feminist timescape for the project
enabling (drawing from words generated by the Collective): a ‘rethinking of sisterhood
and identity’, ‘an awakening’ and a timescape for ‘re-energising strength’. The workshops
were described as ‘insightful’; a space for ‘rethinking gender’; ‘enlightening’; ‘wonderful’;
‘creating new social ideas’; enabling ‘unique experiences’ and generating a sense of
‘women power’. The next sections present a series of representations of the key
themes expressed collectively and drawn from across the letters.

Collective reflection 1: examining the intersections of patriarchy and

neoliberalism in higher education access and participation
Neoliberalism is further compounded by society’s negative traditional and cultural practices
such that opportunities to have formal education are first and predominantly offered to
males. Being the only female in my family did not call for me to be able to go to school
and reach a higher level of education because everybody is expecting me to marry and
give birth for the continuity of the family tree. My mother though was of a different
opinion that females should be empowered and have the same opportunities as their
male counterparts. She believed that education was the only weapon for a woman to have
relevance in our society where males continue to rule. She encouraged and supported me
with all the resources she had to see me through education. Having higher education
opened doors that otherwise would have been difficult. However, females who are lucky
enough to have educational access are still required to play the roles expected of mothers
or wives by helping or lending a hand at home to clean, cook meals and care for children.
Yet, one of my key constructive moments when I was growing up was the opportunity to
building my capacity through the house chores that my mother gave me. The hard work
of walking long distances to the farm, weeding, planting, harvesting, carrying loads of
food home, fetching water from the river, house cleaning, cooking, etc. has been my best
training in life. It helped me develop the attitude and skill of hard work, a valuable resource
in the neoliberal university. In this way, women are empowered to manage the home, chil-
dren, career, micro and macro businesses and her whole life independent of the man.
(Administrator)
When I finally got the appointment to start teaching there in 2008, I was sure I had done the
right thing and was finally at the right place. But I was wrong. As a lecturer in gender studies
and later on as a manager of a Gender Development Centre, I soon realized that I was not
regarded as a “proper” lecturer. Some colleagues even nicknamed me “madam gender”. I
was excluded from most meetings, courses outside and was even denied some entitlements.
Femininity is marginalized, underestimated, undermined, silenced and more often than not,
made irrelevant. Yet the Centre was making a lot of money from the courses being run. Can
neoliberalism explain this? How can commodification of knowledge explain this? Does
culture or ethnicity play a part? (Academic)

These reflections illustrate that neoliberalism is not a monolithic force that straightfor-
wardly explains experiences of gendered inequalities in and outside of higher education.
8 P. J. BURKE ET AL.

Rather different, heterogeneous and intersecting forces are at play across a range of social
and personal timescapes that impact women’s higher education access and experiences,
often in unpredictable and contradictory ways. This includes ways that expectations of
girls in the family sometime work in surprising ways as valuable foundational training
for the neoliberal university. Continuity and change happen simultaneously across the
timescapes of women’s struggles to access education and to be positioned as legitimate,
recognizable and valued persons within the micro-politics and macro-structures of family
and educational spaces. Although family structures and patriarchal discourses often
reinforce girls’ unequal access to education, their position of responsibility provides a
source of power as a resource to navigate and challenge gendered inequalities. Yet
even when ‘successful’ in gaining access to higher education as a lecturer and managing
an income-generating centre that theoretically should generate some form of position
and esteem in terms of neoliberalism, sustained patriarchal structures repeatedly recup-
erate unequal and exclusionary relations that reposition women as ‘out of place’ in the
university. This gendered misrecognition is formed through the unequal patterns of cul-
tural value that are sustained in the neoliberal timescapes of higher education, in which
enduring forms of women’s status subordination are at play with contemporary neoliberal
imperatives.

Collective reflection 2: unequal time structures and the politics of gender

My joy of joining academia was the opportunity to have control over my time – not to be
fixed into an 8am – 5pm job. However, I need to publish or perish so my time is always
not enough for me. Your promotion depends on the writing of articles, your teaching and
your service to the community in which you find yourself. Eiiii!!!!! Hmmmmm!!!!. I have to
take up the household responsibilities as well as teaching, community service and publication
roles. I have been continuing with my blended approach with the support of my husband
always. This has helped me to be relevant in my field of specialization at the same time as
fulfilling my role as a mother and a wife to my family. (Academic)
Going through the terminal degrees programme as a mother of four young children was a
great challenge. I had to plan my life such that I was working throughout the night to meet
deadlines and schedules. I continued the blend model until I successfully completed my pro-
gramme. Yet, putting papers together for promotion is even seen as a threat because one man
asked if I wanted to be the next Dean or Pro VC. This man felt I needed to slow down because
certain positions are destined for men. I strived to be the best throughout my entire edu-
cational life. However, neither the efforts nor the excellence were applauded, I was rather pre-
judiced. Everything I achieved as the best student, and the best female student for the year,
were all attributed to grade favours from men in exchange of sex; something I never tried.
The image painted of me was so horrible that I needed to stay away from my course mates
after school in order not to hear more of such demeaning stories. (Academic)
Unfortunately, these misconceptions once again followed me to the workplace where most
people thought I didn’t deserve certain positions because of my gender and my age. In their
minds, such positions could only be given to a young woman like myself who had sexual
relationships with men in top management positions. My life even got worse at work
when I was assigned to a male boss who always wanted to prove to me that I wasn’t as intel-
ligent as I had been made to believe. (PhD candidate)
In my institution’s dynamics, there are complex power relations there where femininity is
marginalized, underestimated, undermined, silenced and more often than not, made irrele-
vant, thus meritocracy no longer works the way it should, but networks and mediocrity pre-
vails. (Administrator)
 GENDER AND EDUCATION 9

Letter writing illuminated that neoliberal discourses of meritocracy are deeply flawed, as
are the time structures that subtly work to conceal gendered injustices. Neoliberal dis-
courses of meritocracy tend to construct time as a neutral site to be managed effectively
by the individual, disregarding the inequalities that shape a person’s differential relation-
ship to time (Bennett and Burke 2018). Rather, time is not straightforwardly managed to
ensure success but is an unequal structure that conceals gendered inequalities. Managing
time to produce papers for publication is highly challenging when time is pulled in mul-
tiple and competing directions with the demands of universities rubbing against gen-
dered expectations and commitments within familial spaces. Yet, despite these
challenges many of the women in our Collective met the rigid demands and expectations
of higher education through an individual tenacity and resilience that is arguably cele-
brated by neoliberal higher education. Despite this, the intersections of neoliberalism
with patriarchy sustained gendered injustices of misrecognition for many of us. Indeed,
this was often problematically perceived by others as a deliberate manipulation of
abusive patriarchal practices for personal gain. In this way, the pressures of the neoliberal
university were made untenable by the patriarchal discourses and structures that women
attempted to navigate.

Collective reflection 3: discriminatory structures

An interesting issue happened when my husband was asked to hold a higher position on one
of the university’s campuses that needed to take my family out of Accra. I had been ranked
higher than him but was not asked to take up that position because all those in the position
are males. When it was communicated to him to go, he told them that they needed to ask
permission from me if I was interested in moving out of Accra. He was told that, a woman
would automatically follow the husband so he was not to worry. When the time was due, I
refused to move and it became a big issue for them to deal with. (Academic)
[X HE Institution] is still male dominated. Female academics still suffer a lot of discrimination
in terms of appointments and promotions as they are not regarded as capable of leading. This
explains why to date, [X HE Institution] cannot boast of even an acting Dean of any school.
There are all men in the Executive Management team and the situation will remain so in the
foreseeable future. As more and more female lecturers join the ranks of academics, they are
subject to all kinds of treatments from even students. There have been instances where stu-
dents had the nerve to ask female lecturers for a date. (Academic)
I have personally suffered prejudice as a young woman in male dominated environments
where intelligence and hard work were never appreciated/applauded, but I was judged
based on my gender. It was perceived that a young fashionable woman could not excel in
the engineering and technology fields without receiving favours from men, or ultimately,
sleeping with men in exchange of grades. (PhD candidate)

The letter extracts point to shared experiences of discriminatory structures that make it
difficult for women to progress in relation to their aspirations, despite their achievements
and capacities, which were regularly misrecognized. Although these were personal
accounts, the collaborative, feminist approach to sense-making enabled a collective
analysis to emerge of how the personal was shaped by broader structures and relations
of inequality. Our analysis pointed to the institutionalized misrecognition of women’s
capability in higher education, further compounded by the lack of women in senior lea-
dership positions. There was little institutional space therefore for women to directly rep-
resent the gendered injustices that perpetuate women’s status subordination within
10 P. J. BURKE ET AL.

higher education despite the achievements that might be expected to generate recog-
nition. The recognitive injustice perpetuated the deeply flawed perception that women
did not have the ability to excel in male-dominated subject areas such as engineering
and technology and further enabled the sexual harassment and abuse of female lecturers.
Together we considered the question: how might such gendered injustices be challenged
by developing collective knowing, sense-making and awareness across our different con-
texts and experiences?

Collective reflection 4: interrogating critiques of neoliberalism

Neo-liberalism did not affect universities much as they were not forced to restructure or
change their policies – for example, same rules and regulations regarding recruitment and
progression remained, and the government still gives study loans to students and allocates
to public universities, and the numbers of universities increased modestly as a result of neo-
liberalism. Commercialization of education was not promoted feverishly. All citizens had fees
paid for at university, as part of post-independence manpower development. My government
paid for my education from primary through Ph.D and I have never been required to pay this
back. The only requirement was to work for at least two years for the government after my
first degree. (Academic)
As professionals in academia, the opportunity to build linkages and networks has been
largely due to neoliberalism. Professional networks have provided avenues for female staff
to be given the opportunity to meet or interact, as we are doing now at this workshop,
and learn, teach and contribute towards capacity building, policy formulation and sometimes
implementation. It provides the opportunity to get cues and learn lessons regarding coping
strategies which would enable one to withstand and fare well in academia. (Administrator)

The letter-writing process gave space to acknowledge the complexities of how political
forces such as neoliberalism have unpredictable effects, at times supporting women’s
aspirations and career progression. We considered the importance of developing critical
analysis with the capacity to examine the intricacies of intersecting political forces in ways
that do not reduce constructions of these as monolithic or one-dimensional entities.
Reflections through letter-writing of our experiences of neoliberalism brought to light
the complicated nature of its relationship to gendered injustices, at times enabling
women to challenge patriarchal discourses and to engage in higher education as equal
and institutionally recognized participants. Furthermore, neoliberalism works in compli-
cated ways with government policy, which continues to provide funding to universities
and students in Ghana as public institutions. This encouraged us to recognize the impor-
tance of nuanced questioning, avoiding taken-for-granted assumptions about how neo-
liberalism shapes gendered experiences and inequalities to recognize the ways women
might at times experience neoliberalism as an enabling force in their lives.

Collective reflection 5: recognition of the value of a collective feminist

timescape
I have not really reflected on the effect of neo liberalism on my life. The presentation gave me
the opportunity to reflect on my experiences at (X Institution). Indeed, as I sat through the
presentation, I asked myself many questions. Could neoliberalism be responsible for the
kind of treatment I got from (X Institution)? Could it be that gender issues were not the
‘big issues’ that could bring in money? Were lecturers in gender inferior? It was really
 GENDER AND EDUCATION 11

difficult to tell how neoliberalism could provide all the answers to the many questions that
were running through my mind. (Academic)
Discussions at this gathering has energized me to remain focus in order to succeed in my
career and also mentor students who are facing worse situations of exclusion as a result of
neoliberalism and gender. Neoliberalism has become the common sense but I have heard
of the choice to strategize, lobby and collaborate to be relevant in higher education space
and also to be resilient to avoid exclusion – conscientization has taken place. It is evident
that we have not found a replacement for neoliberalism but we can also make adjustments
to structures to suit changing trends. (PhD Candidate)
The sense of political activism and awareness is unforgettable. I hope we will meet soon to
learn from each other as we did. (Academic)
This gathering has been very rewarding, the opportunity to meet, interact and share with
women of substance. It rekindled the Ghanaian way of living – communal life. Our diversity
makes gatherings like this very inspiring as we share from our varied lives and experiences
shaped by our culture and beliefs. (PhD candidate)

The value of the timescape provided through collective letter writing and the feminist
PPOEMs framing the workshops was repeatedly articulated through the letters. The
opening up of time and space to deeply consider the effects of neoliberalism and patri-
archy on personal and collective experiences was seen as significant for the women to
make sense of their identities and lives in, through and beyond higher education. The
emphasis on praxis as reflection/action and as a form of feminist scholarship and activism
was deeply valued by the Collective. The collaborative ethos and the emphasis on re-
searching, co-learning, reciprocity and peer mentoring was identified by the Collective
as key dimensions of struggles for greater gender equity in higher education, which we
hoped to sustain over time. The pedagogical underpinning of the workshops as a form
of ongoing interrogation of our ‘knowing’ about our lives, experiences and the institutions
we inhabited was found to be of value to the reflexive processes we committed to as re-
searchers. Furthermore, the focus on an ethics of care, the relational, and the collaborative
helped create new practices and orientations against the individualist, competitive and
performative environments we navigated.

Discussion and final reflections

This paper has explored the experiences of women in Ghanaian higher education as they
navigate and make sense of the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and patriarchy
through letter writing as feminist praxis. We engaged a process of re-searching our experi-
ences of higher education through feminist analyses and by collectively examining the
discourses at play in the different timescapes (e.g. of work, study and family) we navi-
gated. Our reflections illustrate that neoliberalism is not a monolithic force that straight-
forwardly explains experiences of gendered inequalities in and outside of higher
education. Rather different, heterogeneous and intersecting forces are at play across a
range of timescapes that impact women’s higher education experiences in unpredictable
and contradictory ways.
Neoliberalism emerges as a complex context in which there are some opportunities for
women’s access to and participation in higher education and for their career aspirations
to be realized, albeit in highly constrained and problematic ways. Indeed, there are
moments in our collective letter-writing that neoliberalism is represented as an appealing
and enabling framework for women to progress their careers. Yet, patriarchal structures
12 P. J. BURKE ET AL.

and discourses intersect with neoliberalism in insidious ways perpetuating institutiona-

lized patterns of cultural value that privilege masculinity, and this is illuminated
through accounts of ‘gender-specific forms of status subordination’ (Fraser 2013, 162)
revealed in the letters. Neoliberalism and patriarchy work together to intensify the tem-
poral structures and the everyday pace in which women are expected to be highly pro-
ductive in higher education while simultaneously meeting the pressures imposed on
them within the spaces of home and family.
Drawing from feminist theory, we have argued that higher education is a fluid,
dynamic and complex institution, constituted materially and discursively in relation to
the lived and embodied time–space that women navigate across multidimensional
inequalities. These inequalities include maldistribution of time, resources and labour.
They also include the misrecognition of women, both in terms of hegemonic construc-
tions that perpetuate gendered expectations and inequities of unpaid labour and
caring commitments and in terms of women’s capability and potential. Further, the
achievements of women are often grossly misrepresented as connected to sexual
favours, distorting the profound problem of sexual harassment and abuse in higher edu-
cation (Morley 2011). Opportunities for women to directly represent their interests insti-
tutionally are not only greatly limited by the lack of women in senior leadership positions
but also by the political asymmetries embedded in higher education structures, related to
the intersections of neoliberalism and patriarchy.
Through our collective feminist praxis we ask: what are the possibilities for resistance
and for developing counter-hegemonic timescapes in the struggle for gender equity? The
letters indicated moments of feminist resistance within the family, opening opportunities
for daughters despite the patriarchal order and unequal access to education for girls and
women. There were also moments of explicit recognition of the contradiction at play that
the pressure on girls to meet gendered expectations in the family can become a form of
strength and resilience for women in the neoliberal university.
The opening of time and space through the redistribution of resources, by funding the
residential workshops and by creating pedagogical resources that made feminist theories
accessible for all workshop participants, was important in supporting a sense of collective
energy for change. This enabled deep consideration of the effects of neoliberalism and
patriarchy on gendered inequalities and women’s experiences of the contradictory time-
scapes of family and higher education. The women expressed the significance of this in
processes of making sense of their identities and lives in, through and beyond higher edu-
cation and in sharing a commitment with others in struggles for gender equity. This coun-
tered the individualism of neoliberal frameworks, and allowed us to embrace deep
collaboration through feminist praxis.
Through our workshops and analysis, key questions emerged, which we share here as a
form of conclusion and in the spirit of ongoing and collective reflexivity: how can we
sustain a shared commitment over time to trouble persistent but dynamic patterns of
inequality through concerted attention to our lived and different experiences? And,
through our commitment to this process of transformation, what are the possibilities
for challenging gendered inequalities in higher education? How can new practices of
knowing through difference (perhaps through a process of exercising ‘un-knowing’ in
Lather’s 2009 terms) emerge through our collective commitment to transformation?
 GENDER AND EDUCATION 13

This raised the ongoing challenge for our Ghanaian Feminist Collective about the pos-
sibilities to create and sustain counter-hegemonic timescapes and, through this, to con-
tribute to creating the conditions for collaboration, reflexivity and resistance against the
persistent maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation that women continue
to navigate.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
The workshops for this project were funded by University of Newcastle Vice Chancellor – Research
Making a Difference.

Notes on Contributors
Professor Penny Jane Burke is the director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education
and Global Innovation Chair of Equity at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
Dr Gifty Oforiwaa Gyamera is the Head of Department, Development Policy, at the Ghana Institute
of Public Administration and Management.

ORCID
Penny Jane Burke http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9924-706X

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